What do you think of the publishers' practice of silently changing older books and even classics to remove language now considered offensive by most people or even some people? It is increasingly widespread.

Yesterday I requested a number of Agatha Christie mysteries from the library as I won't be able to get there for awhile. But she is an author who is the subject of this practice so I had to search for older copies that would appear as the author wrote them.

Occasionally, I think it's justified--the original title of Christie's And Then There Were None was changed early on in the UK and rightly so, and never published with that title in the US. But for myself I think the practice has gone way too far. It would be better, I think, for the publisher to put a note at the beginning of the book so people could make a choice about whether they wanted to read it..

What do you think?